Thinking about art from the prism of speculation may involve the creation of alternative futures. Introducing doubt, babbling, the “what ifs”, counter-memory against the ideal need of a primal origin (or source of meaning where we recognise each other) and being open to discontinuity, chance and materiality in history means asking ourselves if it is possible to both make and think about art in different ways. If it is possible to envision another history from other horizons of meaning, not so much to pursuit its truth but to question the meaning and the value embedded in the stories of our truths. This conference thus proposes to speculate about futures as contemporary fables producing truth effects imbued with ethical and political significance. Speculations over futures within the arts seek to contradict traditional modes of conceiving art history by means of meanings that stimulate thinking rather than generating new truths with which we align ourselves. Fables or stories that make people think, like toolboxes, upon which history is being “fictionalized” from a political reality that makes it true, just the same way politics which does not yet exist are being “fictionalized” from a historical reality. We seek to explore not only one but multiple senses, not one but multiple and diverse art histories, ignored or omitted, including artists, materials, technologies or excluded geopolitical zones of repeated and commonly accepted stories. Such histories of art are to be investigated and revealed from a cosmopolitical scope that is aimed at building a common space where no one can claim the right to choose the central point of view from which a subject must be addressed. A space of coexistence of the otherness without the need of articulating consensus: a space of coexistence in the divergence that accounts for our constitutive heterogeneity. This conference aims at assembling differences in semantic-materials skeins of all those agents involved in the art world, whether they are visible or invisible to be revealed, human or non-human, objects, materials, speeches, technologies or relational infrastructures that build and are in turn built as specific forms of governance. Precisely these art infrastructures, inherited from the Enlightenment, promised modernity, development and progress, but their lives have been shown to be made of fragile relationships between people, things, and institutions that try to govern them. Today its very fragility allows us to approach these infrastructures through maintenance and repair in order to shed light on actors, places and moments that have been overlooked or silenced by their stories. This conference will examine alternative art histories that are committed to the material turn while moving forward, hand in hand, with methodological-theoretical perspectives such as media archaeology, new materialism, speculative realism or actor-network theory and social studies of science and technology exploring the world of the arts by means of speculation. Approaches that have already placed their focus on relationships, dismantling modern maxims that keep nature, society and technology confined.

Research Lines

• Divergent and uncategorizable art histories, from a non-linear temporal approach, linked to perspectives of media archaeology or anarchive on the one hand and heteronymous or abject art approaches on the other.
• Processes of rendering visible and invisible agents and agencies in the arts, linked to discourses on the human and nonhuman – regardless of whether these are animals, microbes or things-, the Anthropocene and reconstruction of the relationship between nature, technology and society.
• Processes of rupture, maintenance and repairing practices related to art and infrastructure, linked to exhibitions, museums and exhibition centres or production and research spaces, etc.
• Cosmopolitical approaches from the arts whose anti-homogenizing potential aims at describing the possibilities of mutual co-existence and living with difference, understanding of the creation of any political horizon that is based on the creation of sustainable relationships with otherness.
• Diffractive approaches to the arts from a situated knowledge related to posthumanism and postgender studies.

Keynote 1.
Writing Transnational Histories: Cruising and Entanglement

Keynote: Dr. Alpesh Kantilal Patel, Florida International University
Convener: Christian Alonso, Universitat de Barcelona

Dr. Alpesh Kantilal Patel’s art historical scholarship, art criticism, and curating reflect his queer, anti-racist, transnational and practice-led approach to contemporary art. He is director of the MFA in Visual Arts program and an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. This fall, he is Critical Fellow at Cranbrook Academy of Art where he is delivering two keynote lectures on the subject ‘artistic practice as theory and as entangled with the world’. His monograph ‘Writing transnational South Asian art histories: cruising and entanglement’ is forthcoming from Manchester University Press (June 2017). He recently completed research supported by the Fulbright Foundation for his book project ‘Contemporary Eastern European art history: queer practices and transregional frames’. In the spring of 2017, he will chair the panel ‘Art History as Créolité/Creolising Art History’ for the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in England. A frequent contributor of exhibition reviews to artforum.com, Dr. Patel has published in Artforum (print), Art in America, hyperallergic.com, and frieze. Click here for more information on the book Creolizing Europe, to which he contributed a chapter related to the topic of the conference.

Keynote 2.
Maria de los Ángeles de Rueda

Keynote: Maria de los Ángeles de Rueda, Universidad Nacional de la Plata, Argentina
Convener: Daniel López del Rincón, Universitat de Barcelona

Maria de los Ángeles de Rueda Art History professor at Universidad Nacional de La Plata Plata (UNLP), on matters related to the visual arts in the European and Latin American Modernity. It is responsible for several seminars at the Masters Conservation of Architectural and Cultural Heritage, the Master of Aesthetics and Art Theory and Comparative Literature Master (attached to the UNLP). She has been Director of the Institute of History of Argentine and American Art (2005-2014) and Director of the Master of Aesthetics and Art Theory (2005-2012). She currently heads the project Territoriality, Arts and Media: aesthetic collaborative practices around issues of territory. She has published numerous articles on contemporary art, which address various topics such as archive and the city, art and media, and photography related to the body politic. Among the books (as author and editor), include: Arte y Utopía: la ciudad desde las artes visuales (Asunto Impreso Ediciones, 2003), Arte y Medios: entre la cultura de masas y la cultura de redes (Al Margen Ediciones, 2014) and Revoluciones, Apropiaciones y Críticas a la Modernidad. Itinerarios del Arte Moderno entre América Latina y Europa 1830-1945(Ediciones de la UNLP, 2015).

Keynote 3.
The Cracks of the Contemporary

Keynote: Rick Dolphijn, Utrecht University
Convener: Pau Alsina, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya

Rick Dolphijn is a writer and a philosopher. He teaches and does research at Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities. From 2017 to 2020 he will be Honorary Associate Professor at Hong Kong University (Hong Kong). He wrote Foodscapes, Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (Eburon/University of Chicago Press 2004) and New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Open Humanities Press 2012, with Iris van der Tuin). He has recently published This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life (edited by Rosi Braidotti, Brill/Rodopi 2014/5). He writes on the contemporary, on art, theory and politics. Currently he is finishing a new monograph entitled Surfaces: How Philosophy and Art Matter.

Keynote 4.
The Cosmopolitical Forest

Keynote: Ursula Biemann, Artist, Zurich
Convener: Anna Maria Guasch, Universitat de Barcelona

Ursula Biemann is an artist, writer, and video essayist based in Zurich, Switzerland. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations where she investigates climate change and the ecologies of oil, ice, forest and water, as in the projects Egyptian Chemistry (2012), Deep Weather (2013) and Forest Law (2014) and most recently in Subatlantic (2015 and Biosemiotic Borneo (2016). Her video installations are exhibited worldwide in museums and at international art biennials in Liverpool, Sharjah, Shanghai, Sevilla, Istanbul, Montreal, Venice and Sao Paulo. She had comprehensive solo exhibitions at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Lentos Museum Linz, Bildmuseet Umea, and Helmhaus Zurich. Biemann is part of the collaborative World of Matter project (worldofmatter.net) and received the 2009 Prix Meret Oppenheim, the national art award of Switzerland. (www.geobodies.org)